The number of choices you have to make to each and every day can add up into the thousands; from what clothes you put on in the morning and what you eat for lunch, to which email to respond to next or what meeting to prepare for.
And if you also have a family household to manage, well … the number of decisions you have to make for others can rack up even quicker.
Some sources claim that we make up to 35,000 decisions every day (Sahakian & Labuzetta, 2013) and 226.7 decisions each day on just food alone (Wansink and Sobal, 2007).
It’s no surprise then, when it comes to making decisions about your business and marketing strategy, decision fatigue can become a real problem.
If you’re already facing a thousand or more decisions about day-to-day stuff, when you try to make decisions on the bigger business and marketing stuff, your brain can be running tired-and-wired.
Mental overload
I liken it to having too many tabs open on your browser or too many apps running in the background of your phone … because your brain is full of mundane thinking, it just doesn’t have the capacity to move up a gear to deal with the seemingly bigger or more important decisions about your business.
So if you feel you are struggling with motivation or you don’t think you are a good decision maker, it may be that you just don’t know what to do next because you are relying on your logic brain too much.
Decision making is one of the “secrets” to business success; you probably know that it’s action, rather than ideas, that grow your business and action can only happen once you’ve made a decision. So if you find it difficult to make decisions, which in turn means you aren’t taking action, it can really hold you back in your business growth journey.
The P Cycle
Many years ago, I came up with The P Cycle; the constant and exhausting swirl of perpetual learning, which leads to perfectionism, which leads to procrastination which leads straight back to perpetual learning.
Because when you don’t know something (which is ALWAYS the case with most of your business and marketing decision, yes?!), it feels that you ought to go out and learn more about whatever it is you are making a decision about first, before actually making a decision to take action on it.
However, this can mean you keep learning because you are striving to be perfect, which then leads to procrastination and back to perpetual learning again so you are forever seeking ideas and learning more about how to do something.
You never quite get out of The P Cycle to take actual action and move forward with your business idea or marketing initiative.
So is decision making a skill you can learn?
Yes, sure it is.
You can use tools such as the classic SWOT or cost-benefit analysis to help you weigh up the pros and cons. But for most of your decisions you have to make in your business, these decisions making tools have the danger of keeping you in the P Cycle.
These tools can keep you in your head, forcing you to seek information externally and you use logic to come to the ‘right’ decision which can delay the decision making process even further.
Is there another way of making a decision?
Yes, I’m glad you asked!
Because there is an important space within us that very few of us know how to access on a day-to-day basis.
You probably feel it from time to time and perhaps, like me, you know it’s there because so many people around you refer to it.
Some people call it a gut feeling.
Others may call it intuition.
It doesn’t really matter whether you may feel it or hear it in your gut, soul, heart or solar plexus, it’s the thoughts and feelings that come to you when you are in the shower, or out walking in nature, or when you are doing anything but trying to solve a problem and make a logical decision.
Having spent the first 25+ years of my adult life as a strong, independent woman (yup, I really was on track to burn out by the time I got to 42 – I was so in my head that I didn’t see the signs!), I really didn’t know how to access this intuitive way to help me make decisions.
Just like that browser with too many tabs open; at some point that spinning circle of doom comes on the screen and you realise the only thing you can do is shut down and re-boot your laptop.
In my 40s, when recovering from my burnout, I decided I needed to re-boot, slow down and explore different ways of growing and building my business, and this is why I’ve come to see that there is a simpler process to decision making when you learn how to get out of your head, and connect with your intuitive self.
What is intuition?
Everyone experiences intuition differently. For some, it comes as words or phrases. Others feel it as a gut feeling or a sixth sense. Some even experience it as a physical sensation.
The trick is to figure out how your intuition communicates with you. The more you get out of your head and pay attention to what’s going in your body, the more you’ll notice it. And when you start to honour your intuition and act on it, it becomes more noticeable, and your connection with it grows stronger.
Many people think they aren’t intuitive. I certainly didn’t think I was growing up in my 20s and 30s. But when I speak to my clients and ask them to recall a time they ‘just knew’ something wasn’t right—be it in business, finance, relationships, health, or anything else—everyone can remember an instance.
So if you’d like to find a way of accessing your intuition more to help you make decisions more easily – and thus take action on the stuff that’s going to grow your business – here’s what I love to invite you to do.
Learn to be a tracker of how your intuition shows up.
I’ve been on a huge journey over the last few years, re-connecting with myself and discovering how our energies work and flow.
I have had to learn how to slow down so that I may hear what my body, heart and soul is trying to tell me.
A couple of the regular practices I used to begin this journey was:
- Journalling – the simple practice of writing a few pages of my thoughts before I start my working day
- Using Angel Cards – picking a card before or during my journaling to help me bring awareness to what I could be paying attention to.
Both these practices allowed me to get out of my head and feel into different parts of my body and awareness. And, although it may sound a little woo-woo airy-fairy to be using things like Angel Cards, I have found them to be a practical way to give me another frame from which to see myself from. It’s like finding a four-leaved clover or shiny penny on the floor; these may be old wives’ tales to some but I dare you not to see either of these and NOT smile with the same child-like glee that you may have done when you were younger.
When we can pay attention to our own internal source of information, rather than the logical brain, it’s less exhausting and you will make better business decisions.
A final word about the stories we make up …
It is easy to confuse intuition with stories that we make up in our heads. If you find that you begin to explain why something feels a certain way and you tell yourself stories about it, it’s likely to be projection; you’ve interpreted something to mean something and this is when we start to second guess ourselves or make decisions that serve others, rather than ourselves.
Intuition just is; it doesn’t need to explain, rationalise, or justify.
If your sense or feeling comes with a lot of explanations or rationalisations, it probably isn’t intuition so when this happens, take some time to journal, walk out in nature or meditate to get past the stories. It can also be helpful to turn to a skilled coach or healer, such as myself, who can help you move out of the story in your head and into the wisdom of your body.
